


on a Wednesday morning over a copy of the Times

by darcylindbergh



Series: the definition of justice [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Discussions about Justice, Established Relationship, Ethical Dilemmas, Inspired by the Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-19
Updated: 2018-08-19
Packaged: 2019-06-29 21:59:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15738153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darcylindbergh/pseuds/darcylindbergh
Summary: Justice is not the same thing as fairness.Sherlock leads John forward.





	on a Wednesday morning over a copy of the Times

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to @hudders-and-hiddles and @strangelylikeable for all their love, help, and disregarded commas. You two are the best. This fic was pretty self-indulgent, but if you can't do that in fic, where can you?

Sherlock finds him in the kitchen.

John looks sore and tired, sitting stiff-backed in the chair, his gaze long and unseeing. His fingers curl and uncurl against the tabletop, so slowly he probably doesn’t even know he’s doing it. There’s a cup of tea at his elbow, undrunk; there’s a copy of the Times in front of him, untouched.

It had been a difficult case last night.

Or maybe it hadn’t been, and that’s what was so difficult about it: the sheer straightforwardness of it, the stark black-and-white of it. It had been without grey areas, without nuance, without mitigation or defence. It had been nothing more than a mediocre man in terribly difficult circumstances making a terribly stupid decision, and the confession had spilled out across the rugs of 221B like so much saltwater rushing toward an apathetic shore, washing back with a tide of guilt, rolling away into the dark, stagnant seas of repentance.

The truth can be a terrible thing.

Sometimes that’s all the truth can be.

It hadn’t settled well with John last night. He’d sat, unblinking and unmoving, as Sherlock asked his questions and confirmed his details and, finally, put a hand on the man’s shoulder, shaking with tears, and told him to _go home_. He’d sat as Sherlock locked up the doors and banked the fire, and he’d sat long after Sherlock had put a hand over his and said _come to bed_.

He never did go to bed, not really. Eventually he’d cleaned his teeth and stripped off his clothes and gotten under the covers, but he hadn’t really gone to bed. Not in the way that mattered.

Sherlock ties the belt of his dressing gown closed and has to smother the beginnings of a smile, watching John like this, watching his thoughts start and stop, watching him as he questions himself, as he questions Sherlock, as he questions what he believes, what he knows, what he thinks he knows. As he wonders if it would be better if it were tilted just a little off-kilter somehow.

He’s a good man, his John Watson is: difficult and complicated and unpredictable, but almost _impossibly_ good. It seems like a good time to remind him of it.

“Morning,” Sherlock says softly.

John sniffs and swallows, like he's not quite decided whether he’s going to be angry. “Morning,” he says, reaching for his cup of tea and grimacing when he finds it’s gone cold.

Sherlock crosses the kitchen and sets about making a couple of fresh cups: filling the kettle, taking down clean mugs. He can feel John’s eyes on him. “You’re still thinking about him,” Sherlock says, fiddling with the tea bags. “From last night.”

“Hard not to,” John replies, and yes, there’s an edge in his voice that says he’s ready to be angry, but trying not to be—it’s clear from the effort he’s taking to hold himself back that he’s not angry with Sherlock so much as with the situation in general. “You sent him home. Why? Just to sit around and wait for someone to come and arrest him? You’re not usually that—”

“Cruel?” Sherlock supplies, when John doesn’t want to finish the sentence—he hates it when people mistake Sherlock’s focus for cruelty and coldness, or when Sherlock pretends that that’s what it is; that lesson was learned at too high a cost for them both. He must hate to find himself falling into the same familiar trap once again.

To his credit, though, he doesn’t turn away from it once it’s said. “I suppose, yeah. But there must have been something else, wasn’t there? You wouldn’t just—no.”

Sherlock finishes up the tea and trades John’s stale cup out for a fresh one; John takes it automatically. “Not really my style,” Sherlock agrees. “He’ll be fine, John. Well, drowning in his own guilt for a while, but ultimately fine—no one’s going to arrest him. Private case, remember?” He taps the side of his nose as he sits, stealing the paper out from in front of John and unfurling it. He doesn’t really intend to read any of it, but he knows John, and he knows John is more comfortable with the appearance of distraction and privacy than he is with frankness in a moment like this.

John’s quiet for a minute or two as he sips his tea. “You’re not reporting it to the Met,” he concludes.

“No,” Sherlock says. “I’m not.”

“But he—there was a crime, Sherlock,” John says, exasperated. “You know, crime, bad things that people do that are against the law? You’re a detective, isn’t it your job to catch people who do bad things against the law?”

“Technically,” Sherlock answers, unhelpfully, “a detective is a person who finds out _who_ did the bad thing against the law, or whether a bad thing against the law was even committed. And anyway, isn’t your point that you _don’t_ want me to report him?”

“ _Sherlock_.” The mug makes a loud _chink_ as John sets it down onto the table too hard. “It’s—that’s oversimplifying. It’s irrelevant what I want. You’re just going to let him get away with it, isn’t that, what do they call it—obstruction of justice?”

“Do you really think it would be justice?” Sherlock asks, and across the table, John goes silent. “To turn him in, to ruin his life, to make a felon out of him? Send him to jail, lose his job, lose his family?”

“He’s ruined his own life,” John shoots back, but he doesn’t believe it, not really. He doesn’t even _want_ to believe it, or he wouldn’t have been up all night thinking about it, and this, really, is the crux of it, the sliver John’s been needling at all night, and Sherlock looks at him over the paper, watching as he dislodges it from his own chest and begins to recognise it. His fingers curl around themselves again. “You’re asking whether it would be _fair_ ,” he says finally. “I—it’s not the same thing.”

“No,” Sherlock agrees, “it’s not.”

Maybe it was, once. Maybe there was a time when that was the point of justice: to make things _fair_ , to mete out rewards and punishments equally among those who were wronged and those who did the wronging. To make sure that no one person suffered more or less punishment for the same crimes as any other.

But fairness so easily turns to impartiality, and impartiality to blindness.

Justice is _supposed_ to be blind, they say. She’s supposed to hand down her rulings without regard to class or status, to wealth or privilege, to friend or foe. Maybe that even used to be true, Sherlock thinks. Maybe, in the beginning, blind justice meant justice for all. But probably not.

There can be no justice without context. Nothing that assumes equality in circumstance, in motivation, in remorse, can ever be justice.

Sherlock turns the pages of the Times, rattling them into the silence. John doesn’t take another sip of his tea.

“It’s just—” John finally says, sitting back hard in his chair, smacking his hands against the table. “It’s _not_ fair, is it? It’s not fair. He’s not a bad person, and it’s not fair that he should just be—it’s not. He should never have even had the choice to make, and there’s only so much we can expect from people, you know, because it’s just _people_ , it’s just people trying to live their lives, and sometimes that’s a lot harder than it should be, you know? And—” he counts off the points on his fingers, as if he’s found some sort of _gotcha_ — “and no one was hurt in any way that couldn’t be fixed, and he’s scared out of his mind so it’s not like he’s ever going to do it again, and it’s not _fair_ to just call it a day and make a criminal out of him because somebody who has no idea about any of this says that that’s what _has_ to happen!”

He looks up, nearly breathless with anger. Sherlock puts the paper down.

“I know,” Sherlock says quietly. “That’s what I thought when it was you.”

John nearly flinches, sucking in a breath, and Sherlock can see it in his eyes: that first night, the rush of the chase and the jumble of clues, the threat and the game, the white pill and the goading smile. The gunshot that had cracked through the dark.

“I saved your life,” John says, but not defensively: he knows what Sherlock is saying.

“By killing someone else, yeah. And it was not your first shot, was it? And not your last, either.”

“Never without reason though. We’re—” he hesitates, gives Sherlock a sceptical look, then waves his hand embarrassedly. “It sounds corny to say it out loud, I know, but we’re _do-gooders,_ you know? You said once that there’s no such thing as heroes, but that’s. That’s sort of what we do, isn’t it? We do what good we can, and we flout the laws or whatever and don’t feel guilty about it because we’re trying to do the right thing, even if it isn’t the legal thing.”

“That’s _why_ heroes don’t exist though,” Sherlock counters, aiming for patience and persuasion, not entirely successfully. “Because even though we’re trying to do good things, we’re not especially good people. We can’t do what we do by being good, by always following the rules, by living by the line of justice instead of by fairness, because life’s not fair, a lot of it’s not fair. Look what situations we’ve been in that we’ve broken the rules to get out of, and we don’t have half as much grief and guilt over it as that man did last night. And yet here we sit, in our fancy little flat, drinking our morning tea like regular people. So what makes us different? What makes so wrong for us to _decide_ what’s different, to give people a second chance when justice won’t? And yet, we do end up on the wrong side of the law by doing it.”

John huffs, like he wants to argue but can’t decide how. Eventually the silence drags on long enough that Sherlock goes back to pretending to read the paper, and John starts to fiddle with a page of it, running a finger along the feathery edge. His tea is probably going cold again.

“It’s funny,” he says finally, running his finger down the paper until it hits Sherlock’s hand, then covers it with his own. “We’ve been doing this how long? Five, seven years? And you longer than me. And I don’t think I’ve ever really thought about it before.”

“Well,” Sherlock says, “we really _are_ more in the business of catching the bad guys, rather than letting them go.”

John laughs. “I mean, I know we’re not the best people in the world, but I don’t really think of us as the bad guys. And I suppose most of the people out there, in situations like this, don’t think of themselves as bad guys either. It just—usually we take the difficult ones. Blowing people up in swimming pools and shooting people in penthouses is a lot more clear cut that this sort of thing. We’re just usually, you know. A bit more unusual.”

“Oh, is that what they’re calling it these days, _unusual?_ I’ll have to call up Mummy, won’t that be an awkward conversation.” John laughs again, and Sherlock turns his hand over to catch John’s fingers with his and squeezes. “Look, so what. Justice _isn’t_ always fairness, and morality, such that we have it—and admittedly we don’t have much—isn’t always in line with legality. So what? That’s why I decide, that’s why we decide. That’s why we don’t work for the Met.”

John squints, but he grins, too. “I thought that was because the Met were a bunch of tossers who couldn’t find their way out of paper bag.”

“That _is_ a factor, yes. But only a factor.” He squeezes once more. “It’s easier when the bad guys wear neat little Villain name-badges, I admit. But this is worth it too, don’t you think? So maybe we let one guy go, but maybe we also save his life a little. Give him a second chance. It’s not a bad position to be in.”

“No,” John agrees, squeezing Sherlock’s hand back. Some of the tension has already lifted off his shoulders; he breathes a little easier. “I mean, I always knew this was worth it, what we did. What you do, really.” He lets his grin grow a little. “Didn’t expect you to be so philosophical about it though. You’re full of surprises.”

“Really?” Sherlock quirks an eyebrow. “What _do_ you think about in the bath then, if not the complicated socio-legal philosophy of Western politics?”

John heaves a great put-upon sigh. “I’m afraid I’m a bore,” he says. “I usually think about you.” He uses his free hand to tug the paper out of Sherlock’s grip and away, shoving it unceremoniously onto the floor as he stands and moves so that he’s balanced on the edge of the table, leaning over Sherlock. “There’s just one thing,” he says, “that we’re going to have to disagree on.”

Sherlock tilts his head back to look him in the eye and tries again to smother the smile beginning on his mouth. “What’s that, then?”

“You really are a good man, Sherlock Holmes,” John says, and kisses him.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on [tumblr!](http://www.watsonshoneybee.tumblr.com)


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